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Dominic Hargreaves writes "This year GNOME received 181
applications to Google's Summer
of Code program, yet none were from women. As a result, they've
decided to address this imbalance by launching an outreach program to
sponsor three female students to work on GNOME-related projects this
summer." Most any science department will tell you that the amount of interest and involvement of women pales next to men of similar age and background. Is this sponsorship a creative way to get women interested in GNOME, or is it merely sexist?

Women make up 51 percent of the population, and because of this, Linuxshould be banned in government. Operating Systems like Linux discriminateagainst women because of a built in difficulty compared with Windows andApple's OS X.

Women pay taxes, and therefore shouldn't be discriminated against ingetting employment with government agencies. If these agencies had usedWindows or OS X, more women would be able to persue dreams of a full timejob in government. Linux is by its nature a man's domain. Women aredesigned to use social interaction and emotions to deal with complextasks, things the command line are ill suited.

OS X, and Windows havefriendly and female-intuitive designs that take into account a woman'sunderstanding of objects,ie. folders, desktops, Clippy, the XP search dog.
These help women operate the computer by giving her a relationship withthese icons, and helpful animated pets. It makes a woman feel at homewith her computer by allowing her to relate to it.

Linux, on the other hand is designed for command line and programming.Sure, it may have a fugly GUI to hide its true being, but to get anyserious work done you must know a bunch of archane commands with hundredsof options that change with every command. Something like this: chmoda+rwx. Only enginners can understand this. And most engineers are stillmen. This puts the female population at a great disadvantage whenappliying for work. Men know this, and that's why they delibratly try toinstall linux in the workplace.

How would womens groups react when they read the studies that are beingcommissioned by industry on this very subject? Surely, women, when theylearn of this, will outvote men and ban linux from the government.

As a developer on a gnome project, I can tell you bluntly that additional women would help. Additional men would help. Heck, additional crack smoking monkeys would even come in handy, as long as they could tell the difference beween a semaphore and a banana*.

Does anyone else see irony in an article where there is an apparent attempt to bring more women into the OSS community being tagged "Gnome, Chicks, Women"?
Oh, wait - I just reloaded the page and the "Chicks" tag is now gone!
Guess that means I'm not the only one who noticed...

a girlfriend of mine told me not to get involved with that little Gnome leprechaun, apparantly one drink, one rohypnol and she ended naked chained to a python with a hell of a VI headache in the morning, and the only thing he left in the room were a bunch of old 'getting the best out of visual basic 1.0' manuals... little rat b4stard.

I was going to say; the command line can let you express feelings. But then I caught myself. The only feelings I could express at the command line were male feelings after all. unzip, strip, touch, finger, grep, mount, fsck, more, yes,fsck,fsck,fsck,umount, sleep -- More proof Linux is sexist!

I have some anecdotal evidence to support that claim. A (straight, male) friend of my brother tried to apply at a place such as you mention. This franchise hires almost exclusively women, and when he went in and asked for an application, they refused to even give him one. It is for this reason that I am boycotting this store. The next time I need some new undergarments, I will not go into Victoria's Secret. I suppose that it doesn't hurt them much, as I never shopped there anyway. Perhaps my actions will inspire others, where it might hurt their bottom line.

Most any science department will tell you that the amount of interest and involvement of women pales next to men of similar age and background. Is this sponsorship a creative way to get women interested in GNOME, or is it merely sexist?

As even the most basic scholar of Disney can tell you, there's almost always a ratio of one woman to every seven gnomes.

Of course, Smurfologists would argue the situation's even worse. No wonder the little buggers are blue.

Actually, there's lots of stuff being done by nursing schools to bring in male students. Partly to address the nursing shortage, and partly to achieve gender equity (or at least get closer to it) just for the sake of doing it.And the real reason, more staff capable of moving fat patients. As the general population gets larger, so must the carrying capacity of the average nurse.

In light of your incredibly keen insight, I have decided to have a sex change to do my part to increase the number of women working on open source projects. All males between the ages of 19 - 45 should be replaced by women and minorities to keep reality in step with marketing.

The title is 'Gnome outreach for women'. It's not Linux that drives women away. Women just don't like Gnome. Doesn't match up to their aethetic standard. screen+emacs make the most efficient working enviroment.